Culinary Art
by Givemebritcopsnow
Summary: Hunger is the best relish.


**Culinary Art**

I don't own the characters from "Lewis", I am just borrowing them. This is for non-profit fan purposes only.

All mistakes are mine ...

Robbie Lewis and Laura Hobson had planned to cook dinner together tonight. About an hour ago, Laura had texted Robbie "We'll have a guest for dinner" and she had put a smiley at the end of the message. Robbie came home hungry, his stomach rumbled after having skipped lunch. Laura's car was already in the drive. But there was no answer when he entered the house and called her name, no music playing and no welcoming fragrance from the kitchen.

Robbie dropped his jacket on the sofa and headed for the kitchen. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and looked around. There was a shopping basket with vegetables standing on the worktop. Tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, courgettes, aubergines, peppers and onions and some strange fruit that he had never seen before. Yellowish with spikes outside. The vegetables looked very decorative in their basket but they did not count as real food for a ravenous Robbie. He briefly considered his options.

A glimpse into the fridge told him what Laura had planned to cook: fillets of chicken breast. Low-fat, very healthy. He remembered that Laura had explained something about HDL and LDL and clotted arteries ... There was a bowl standing on the worktop, covered with a lid. Next to it he found a handwritten note: "Gone for a walk with Donald from down the road, back in half and hour, Lx".

Robbie could not remember someone called Donald and concentrated on the task at hand: find a quick bite to eat before cooking a healthy dinner with Laura. He removed the lid from the bowl and sniffed at it. Looked like goulash but did not smell as good as goulash.

But Robbie wasn't picky at all. More than ten years of "pierce and ping", pub food, fish and chips and take-away curry had toughened up his taste-buds and his stomach. This was never enough for two people or even three. Most of it was meat and gravy. His detective brain deduced that Laura had eaten some of it for lunch, left this for him and had forgotten to stick a post-it on the bowl with instructions how to heat it. Robbie shoved the bowl into the microwave and set the timer to three minutes.

Robbie was fully aware that his own cooking skills left room for improvement. He had a limited repertoire of dishes he was able to cook and he was doing his best to learn a few more. He could do a proper fry up. He had managed a decent roast chicken once with James Hathaway's help. Only the canelloni a few weeks ago hadn't exactly been a success. He had tried to keep dinner warm until Laura came home but when he wasn't looking the canelloni had turned into a dark brown mess. Laura and Robbie had eaten the layer between the burnt cheese topping and the charcoal bottom layer and washed it down with a few glasses of wine.

Laura's cooking was so much better than his although she didn't cook every day. She could not do that on top of her daily workload and Robbie didn't expect her to. She liked preparing meals for guests and often consulted heavy cookery books before starting her work in the kitchen. A true scientist ... He loved garlic bread, and she made it especially for him. He smiled to himself. Laura's dishes always looked nice and they smelled and tasted even better. Robbie's stomach rumbled again.

Ping. Robbie took the bowl out of the microwave and lifted the lid. Ugh! That didn't smell as good as he had expected. He took a small spoon and tried a tiny bit of it - definitively lacking salt. Thinking of it - he might try his luck and add a few spices. Robbie wondered when Laura had started working on this goulash today. He knew that it took several hours to make these meat dishes. The smell reminded him of something but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He stepped over to the shelf where they kept the spices and looked through all the little pots and shakers. Worcester Sauce, or tabasco maybe ...? It couldn't get any worse, could it?

At the sound of the key in the front door, Robbie interrupted his search and turned around. Laura was back, dashed into the kitchen and greeted him with a gentle kiss.

"Robbie, what are you doing with Donald's food? It doesn't need to be heated." She pointed to the steaming bowl. Laura's sparkling eyes travelled over the bowl and the spoon in Robbie's hand towards his face, her expression a mixture of amusement and plain disbelief.

Laura grinned "Let me introduce you to our new neighbour Donald ..." She tipped her head towards the living room.

A small, fluffy dog trotted towards Robbie, his huge dark eyes gazing longingly at his dinner - a bowl of "Pedigree Chunks in Gravy".

**Author's note: Merry Christmas everybody, enjoy a delicious meal and have a peaceful time.**


End file.
